After two years of being wiped out or severely hampered by the pandemic, the world’s biggest tech show bounced back with a vengeance in January. The Las Vegas halls were once again flooded with more than 100,000 visitors, all eager to find out what the future holds for the industry in the year to come.
PC Pro’s correspondents were among them, jostling for elbow space on the showfloor and shuttling between hotel suites for behind-the-scenes briefings. In the week we spent in Las Vegas, we saw hundreds of new products and had time to take in the wider tech trends that were emerging.
Here, then, we bring you the nine things we learned from CES 2023. Consider them our guide to what CES revealed about the direction of the tech industry for the year ahead, and the innovations you’re going to be hearing a lot more about in the coming months.
In many categories we’ve picked out key announcements and the precise products that should be on your radar in the coming year. Bear in mind, however, these aren’t strong buying recommendations – we haven’t been able to fully test any of these newly announced devices yet – just our first impressions of products we encountered on the showfloor or in briefing rooms.
1 DISPLAYS ARE REFRESHINGLY GOOD
If you totalled the square footage of all the screens on the CES showfloor, it would cover the moon. Probably.
Displays are a huge part of CES and this year’s show was less of an arm’s race on resolution, more on refresh rate. High-end gaming monitors such as the Zowie XL2566K boasted refresh rates of 360Hz, which looked unbelievably smooth for gaming. Although, as the Zowie rep we spoke to admitted, you’ll probably need every last bit of performance from Nvidia’s new 40 Series graphics chips to achieve those ridiculous frame rates. A rate of 240Hz – which has now been relegated to the next-best thing – is a more realistic target for those without the cutting-edge graphics.
When it comes to bigger screens, 8K remains the resolution watermark, with some TV manufacturers also pushing 6K screens. The big question here is: where’s the content? Even if you weighed in for an 8K display today, you’d have virtually nothing to watch on it. The major TV and movie studios have only just started shooting in 8K; nobody is streaming 8K content yet, to the best of our knowledge. This is a cart that is well ahead of the horse.
What about at the smaller end of the scale? Several manufacturers were showing
